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Hypersonic X-51A WaveRider set to fly May 25

The U.S. government’s unmanned X-51A WaveRider will make its first hypersonic flight test attempt from Edwards Air Force Base on Tuesday, Boeing announced Thursday.

The X-51A will be released from a B-52 bomber off the southern California coast and is expected to fly autonomously for five minutes, accelerating to about Mach 6 using its supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) motor and transmitting data to ground stations before splashing down into the Pacific and breaking up, Boeing said. The company does not plan to recover the flight test vehicle, which is one of four built.

“In those 300 seconds, we hope to learn more about hypersonic flight with a practical scramjet engine than all previous flight tests combined,” Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, said in a news release. The X-51A is a collaboration of the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with industry partners Boeing and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.

Alex Lopez, Boeing vice president of advanced network & space systems, said the program will pave the way to hypersonic weapons and future access to space.

“This is been a major team effort for the past seven years,” he said. “If the test flight meets even a subset of our expectations, the leap in engine technology will be the equivalent to the post-World War II leap from propellers to jet engines. It will be a historic event.”

The longest previous hypersonic scramjet flight test, by a NASA X-43 in 2004, was faster, but lasted only about 10 seconds and used less logistically supportable hydrogen fuel, Boeing said.

The May 25 attempt will be the only one this year, a change from a previously plan to have one last December and two in 2010 because of “a combination of factors,” including demand for flight-test and range assets such as the B-52, Boeing said in the release.

“This is an experimental X-plane and it’s a complicated test. We knew the original schedule was aggressive and we would need to be flexible,” said Brink. “It’s also expensive to keep a staff of engineers and support staff at the ready and then not be able to fly when supporting assets aren’t available. So we elected to make only one hypersonic try this spring and then pause for a few months to conserve funding.”

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